FROM TARTARIA TABLETS
TO SUN CROSSES

COSMIC ROMANIA 20

-text and photos Andrei Dorian Gheorghe;
design Florin-Alexandru Stancu;
special guests Marge Simon (USA),
Valentin Grigore, Dan Uza, Gabriel Ivanescu, Gelu-Claudiu Radu-

As part of the heavenly sight
We have to keep a way of light.

In the end of May 2013
a North-African sand cloud passed over Romania.
So, soon after sunrise,
I watched the sky of Bucharest
to the southeast.

Two hours later
I watched the sky to the northwest…

And to the north…

Then I became melancholic
thinking that a few millennia ago in North Africa
there was the old, flourishing and luminous state of Egypt,
and in a beautiful Bucharestian passage
(Villacrosse, open since 1891)
at the edge of the historical centre
today there is an Egyptian café-bar full of antique symbols.

Every time when I pass through that place I remember that
the old Egyptians gave more great contributions to astronomy,
such as:
-amazing astronomical alignments
which culminated with the pyramids (5th-2nd millennia BC),
-the attitude of astrolatry (along with the Babylonians),
which was, in fact, the ancestor of astronomy,
-their astronomical calendars
of 365 days (3rd millennium BC).

But antique Egypt was conquered in the 4th century BC by Alexander the Great,
who, paradoxically, in his war campaigns
culturally unified the most advanced worlds of his time:
Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and Greece.

So Egypt became pan-hellenic for a while,
led by a Greek dynasty, the Ptolemys.
That dynasty gave a prince in the city of Alexandria, Claudius,
who left in the 2nd century AD
a treatise, Almagest,
which marked astronomy for more than 14 centuries.

(The statue of Alexander the Great in Thessaloniki;
photo taken from a bus by Andrei Dorian Gheorghe in 2012)

In the meantime
Greece and Egypt were conquered in the 1st century BC
by the Roman Empire, that became
the new great military power
and cultural centre of the world.

It is interesting that only in the 1st century AD
Rome decided to conquer Dacia.
Warned that the annexation of this territory had been impossible before
for Persians and Macedonians,
the Romans mobilized an immense army
and, after more battles
(without decisive results,
but presented as Roman victories by Roman chroniclers),
the Roman Emperor Trajan defeated the Dacian King Decebal
(their statues from Bucharest’s Youth Park are reproduced below)
after a betrayal in 106.

Emperor Trajan was so proud of this victory
that he dedicated to it long and luxurious celebrations,
and the construction of a column in the centre of Rome,
which described moments with Dacians and Romans
from Dacia’s partial conquest.

That column has remained over time
the most famous document about the origin of the Romanian people.
More reproductions of its frescoes are placed
in another passage, at another edge of Bucharest’s historical centre,
next to it being positioned a special statue, a present from Rome’s municipality,
with the she-wolf that had given to suck to Romulus and Remus,
the legendary founders of the “eternal city”.

Obviously, Trajan’s Column fascinated many Romanians in history,
from great intellectuals to simple people,
culminating with the case of a peasant called Badea Cartan,
and including later the members of
a modest Romanian expedition to the International Meteor Conference 1999
which took place in Frasso Sabino (60 km distance of Rome).
Thus, Valentin Grigore, Gelu Claudiu Radu and me,
plus two dear foreign friends and famous meteor observers
(David Asher from the UK and Jean Marc Wislez from Belgium)
wanted to see the antique centre of Rome in September 1999…

(Meteor lovers in Rome;
photo by Valentin Grigore, 1999)

FOLLOWING BADEA CARTAN IN ROME
-poem by Andrei Drian Gheorghe;
photos by Valentin Grigore-

In 1895
after 45 days of going by foot to Rome,
the Romanian peasant Badea Cartan from Transylvania
arrived in front of Trajan’s Column
to see with his own eyes
that artistic mirror of Dacia’s conquest by Romans,
practically the genesis of the Romanian people.

He was dressed in traditional clothes of his ancestors,
coming from the Geto-Dacians,
so in the next day
Rome’s people commented that
a Dacian man had come down from Trajan’s column!

104 years later
a few Romanian lovers of meteors
(“falling stars” which come down from the Cosmos)
followed the same road much faster,
by train and by bus,
epigones of a great model,
occasional “Cartans”.

Till now all is clear.
So what could be the connection
between antique Egypt and antique Dacia?

In the 5th century BC
Herodotus wrote in his Histories
that the Thracians were the most numerous after Indians,
and the Dacians were the “bravest and rightest of the Thracians”,
their supreme god being Zamolxis,
who had previously been their prophet and teacher.
(Other historians said that the Dacians lived in an immense territory,
from the Balkan Mountains to the Baltic Sea,
and from Bohemia to the Dnieper River.)
He added as a possible variant that Zamolxis
had been before a slave of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras…

But in the 1st century AD
Strabon wrote in his Geografica
that in fact the main teacher of Dacians
was Deceneus
(the high priest of King Burebista in the 1st century BC),
who had previously prowled much time for studies in Egypt.

In the 6th century AD
Iordanes wrote in his Getica
that the same Deceneus taught the Dacians
a lot of things (ethics, physics, logics etc.),
including astronomy
(zodiacal constellations, planets’ motion, stars’ names,
moon’s phases, solar eclipses’ mechanism…)

With all respect for these historians,
their opinions put on inferiority the general knowledge
in the territories of the Dacians,
where in the 1st century BC
King Burebista united most tribes,
creating a giant kingdom
from the Morava River to the Dnieper River
and from the Forest Carpathians to the Balkan Mountains.

In reality
archaeological discoveries showed that in those territories
the astronomical preoccupations were much older
(anyway, today there are more historians able to demonstrate that
in a world of permanent interferences
the Dacian civilization had, in its turn,
many inspirational elements for the Greek-Roman culture),
starting from the Cernica necropolis
(with tombs orientated to the sunrise direction)
in the 5th millennium BC,
continuing with the Cucuteni culture
in the 4th millennium BC
(the most advanced in Europe at its time,
including large settlements, and solar symbols in paintings
and in sculptures, such as the Ring Dance of Frumusica),
and culminating with the solar sanctuaries of Sarmizegetusa
in the 1st millennium BC.

(It is interesting that a legend says that,
before becoming the Dacian god of sun,
Zamolxis lived for a few years in a cave right under Sarmizegetusa,
and for that the city became later the Dacian Capital.)

More scientists compared the calendar of Sarmizegetusa
with the most famous calendar-monument of antique Europe, Stonehenge,
and calculated that the Dacian one was more precise
(normally, because it was almost two millennia younger).

(Stonehenge, England, UK;
photo by Gelu Claudiu Radu)

(Sarmizegetusa’s calendar and andesite sun;
photo by Gabriel Ivabescu)

Before any conclusion,
I’d like to reproduce a poetic comment in the distance,
which I received in 2007 from a dear American friend of mine,
about Sarmizegetusa’s most interesting place:

I was particularly impressed by the photograph
of the strange antique monument -
like Stonehenge, apparently.
It also reminded me
(the circling straight stones or wooden stakes? )
of a musical or mathematical symbol -
infinity?

-Marge Simon (USA,
editor of the Journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association,
Star*Line, at that time,
and laureate of the Rhysling Award)-

And as a conclusion we can say that till the time of Burebista,
the Dacians demonstrated a strong solar culture,
this kind of culture representing the centre of astronomical culture
for all old civilizations.

Even the scene of King Decebal’s suicide from Trajan’s column
shows that the Dacians had a stylized sun on their shields.

And this is not all,
as you can see after my English adaptation
of a Romanian article published by a fellow in 2013:

IN THE OFFICE OF CURIOSITIES
-text and photos by Dan Uza-

I recently visited the History Museum of Transylvania for an exhibition,
Wunderhammer (The Office of Curiosities).
Among the objects that were exhibited
I remarked the famous Tablets of Tartaria,
an armillary sphere
and the possible component of a UFO.

The clay tablets were discovered over 50 years ago
in Tartaria, Alba County, Romania,
and they seem to include the oldest form of writing known until today.

The armillary sphere was made in an Austrian atelier
in the beginning of the 19th century.
It consists of more metallic rings which could be used
for simulating the position and the motion of stars and constellations.
The central globe represents the Earth.

“The robot sole of Aiud”,
this is the nickname of the strange metallic piece
which was discovered together with some prehistoric bones
on the shore of the Mures River in Transylvania,
inciting the imagination of the UFOlogers.

And after all,
for only 7 “lei” you could buy nice reproductions
after the Tablets of Tartaria.

Thinking of Dan Uza’s article
I can say that
unfortunately for historians
and fortunately for the amateurs of mysteries,
after the demonstration of proto-writing from the Tartaria tablets
(two millennia before the Sumerian cuneiforms
and the Egyptian hieroglyphs)
the Dacian culture became an oral one,
and this was one of the biggest paradoxes of antiquity.
(It is interesting that much later, in the 1980s,
a Romanian mathematician, Florentin Smarandache,
founded in the same geographic space
the Paradoxist Literary Movement,
which became a large international one after he emigrated to the USA!)
However, today there are more enthusiasts
who assert that the Dacian nobility had a secret alphabet,
and in the 4th century AC
Aethicus Histricus (from past Dacia)
used it to write his Cosmographica…

Watching the last photo of Dan Uza,
the round tablet from the centre
seems to be a sun cross.
This supposition is strengthened by a sign visible on the left:
a cross with a semi-circle put down also to the left.
Thus,
this sun cross appears as much older than the Celtic cross,
or the vision of Constantine the Great,
who spent his childhood in Dacia Aureliana
and whose dream,
a cross with the Sun behind,
decided Christianity’s destiny in the Roman Empire
and implicitly in the world since the 4th century.

So maybe it is not incidental that later
the Romanians showed a real cult for sun crosses
(an important symbol of humanity
and the predecessor of the wind rose),
artistically made on most of their Christian-Orthodox churches.

FROM TARTARIA TABLETS TO SUN CROSSES

FROM TARTARIA TABLETS
TO SUN CROSSES